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I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: February 21
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Lost
Didn
Remember
Trying
Life
Lose
Loses

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We looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames
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What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.
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You have to do something bad to do something good.
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Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.
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And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?
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Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
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It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.
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The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.
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They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
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Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.
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And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?
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She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes
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The gift is for you...The surprise is for me.
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I think after you live it's like before you lived.
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Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking that his death, like his life, is without purpose that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not that the universe is a rip.
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I wanted so much to have a life. Even just once, even for a second.
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It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
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